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Easy Fortune Cookies

The recipe for these easy fortune cookies has been on my mind for a full 12 months. Just after Valentines day last year I thought they would make a really cute gift to make a loved one. Fill them up with memories, compliments, inside jokes or stick to fortune telling. It’s entirely up to you.

If you’re anything like me, a Chinese takeaway that doesn’t give out fortune cookies, looses vital review points. I love them but whilst they’re a great way to end your favourite chow mein, they’re not actually Chinese.

Before World War 2 these crispy bites were made by Japanese-American’s and were called fortune tea cakes. When World War 2 hit, the Japanese were forced in to internment camps and the Chinese-American’s pulled a sneaky trick. They’d seen how successful the ‘fortune tea cakes’ were becoming and brought the production under their wing. They ended up under the American umbrella of ‘cookies’, but really they aren’t cookies at all, they’re not Chinese and most people in China haven’t heard of them. It’s all a lie.

The recipe is built on egg whites and as such, has almost no flavour of it’s own without the use of flavouring. You can use any that you fancy but almond, vanilla or orange blossom are the most common types. I actually bought orange blossom especially for this recipe, a year ago! See, I told you I’d been thinking about it for that long.

To get the texture just right, I tested two basic recipes, then combined and tweaked them to get the recipe that worked best for me. The result is easy fortune cookies that hold their shape and taste like the real deal, or at least what we think is the real deal…